Skip to main content

The Massachusetts Lottery

Image result for powerball mass lottery

Greetings, fellow humans, from the Bay State, aka Massachusetts.

I open that way because I'm about to describe a commercial paid for by the state government here, to promote its lottery. That is: to get people to buy the tickets and in most cases lose money.

It is a commercial that seems normal enough inside these state boundaries but outside of them, to our fellow humans, would likely seem very strange indeed.

Other states advertise their lotteries by playing up what the potential winners of the lottery can gain -- the new house! the '60s muscle car! -- the chance to tell your boss where he can shove his next quarterly review! All of that.

In Massachusetts, though, we are treated to TV commercials in which workers using forklifts create a sort of sculpture with the use of $1 billion in cash. (No I didn't get a good luck at the denominations.) There is a voice-over saying words to this effect (I misquote from memory, but this is the gist of it) -- "This is the money you, good people of Massachusetts -- have spent on, that is have lost to, the Massachusetts lottery. We thank you for it, because we --your state -- are doing a lot of good things with it." [Some good things named.] "So please keep playing."

In the weeks during which this ad has been running, news reports indicate that participation in the Mass lottery has dropped.   I think I see the problem.

Do ad agencies working for the Las Vegas casinos say, "Hey, we can't built these really neat fountains and replicas of the Eiffel Tower without your help, dear suckers"?  No: they go with the possible new house, chance to tell off your boss, etc.

A state lottery has been described as "a tax on people who don't understand the laws of probability."

It is certainly taking advantage of people showing ignorance of those laws -- as is the business model of Steve Wynn etc.

Massachusetts' approach, though more honest, seems perverse. "Let us explain to you the laws of probability -- they are the laws that say we're going to get this money and use forklifts to move it around."
Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryJanuary 3, 2020 at 6:00 PM

    I don't know what percentage of lottery ticket purchasers understand the laws of probability, but some do, and they buy the tickets anyway. What they get for their $2 is the pleasure of fantasizing what they will do with the money, whether for themselves or to benefit others. Not a bad deal if it works for you; how many pleasurable experiences cost only $2? (I do not buy lottery tickets, but I have been told this by a lottery ticket purchaser or two.)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more